Fear
by Exangellion
Summary: The Van was behind them, following Joel and Ellie as they drove from Philadelphia to San Francisco to meet Tess at their new home. But why were they being followed, and what sick things would the driver do to them if he caught up and got them to stop? AU. Fair warning: set sometime in the late twentieth century.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1:

**Monday~**

Only four blocks from the furnished apartment in Philadelphia, with more than three thousand miles to drive before they joined Tess in San Francisco, Ellie began one of her games. Ellie thrived on her games, not those with required a board and movable pieces but those which were played inside the head-word games, idea games, elaborate fantasies. She was a very garrulous and precocious fourteen year old with more energy than she was able to use. Slender, shy in the company of strangers, and she wasn't much into sports. She could not exhaust herself in a fast game of football, for sports bored her. She was an intelligent kid, an avid reader, and she found her own games more fun than football. Kneeling on the front seat of the big car and looking out the rear window at the home she was leaving forever, she said, "We're being followed, Joel."

"Are we now?"

"Yeah. He was parked down the block when we put the suitcases in the trunk. I saw him. Now he's following us."

Joel Miller smiled as he wheeled the Thunderbird onto Lansdowne Avenue. "Big black limousine, is it?"

Ellie shook her head, her thick auburn ponytail wagging vigorously. "N, it's some kind of van. Like a panel truck."

Joel looked in the rear-view mirror. "I don't see him."

"You lost him when you turned the corner," Ellie said. She pressed her stomach against the backrest, head thrust over the back seat. "There he is! See him now?"

Nearly a block behind them, a new Chevrolet van turned the corner onto Lansdowne Avenue. At five minutes past six o'clock on a Monday morning, it was the only other moving vehicle in sight.

"I thought it was always a black limousine," Joel said. "In movies, the heroes are always followed by a big black limousine."

"That's only in the movies," Ellie said, still watching the van, which remained a full block behind them. "Nobody's that obvious in real life."

The trees on their right cast long black shadows across half the street and made dizzying, flickering patterns on the windshield. The first sun of May had risen somewhere to the east, still too far down the sky for down the sky for Joel to see it. Crisp spring sunlight bathed the old two-story frame houses and made them new and fresh again.

Invigorated by the early-morning air and by the spray of green buds on the trees, almost as excited as Ellie was about the journey ahead of them, Joel Miller thought he had never been happier. He handled the heavy car with ease, enjoying the quiet power at his disposal. They were going to be on the road a long time in terms of both hours and miles; but as imaginative as she was, Ellie would provide better company than most adults.

"He's still back there," Ellie said.

"I wonder _why_ he's followin' us."

Ellie shrugged her thin shoulders but did not turn around. "Could be lots of reasons."

"Name one."

"Well...He could have heard that we were moving to California. He knows we'll take our valuables with us, ya' know? Family treasures, things like that. So he follows us and runs us into a ditch on some lonely stretch of road and robs us at gunpoint."

Joel laughed. "Family treasures? All you have is clothes enough for the trip. Everythin' else went out on the moving van a week ago, or it went with your sister on the plane. And I assure you that I've brought nothin' more valuable than my wristwatch."

Ellie was unperturbed by Miller's amusement. "Maybe he's an enemy of yours. Someone with an old grudge to settle. He wants to get hold of you before you leave town."

"I don't have any _real_ friends in Philly," Joel said. "But I don't have any real enemies, either. And if he wanted to beat me up, why didn't he just catch me when I was putting our bags in the trunk?"

Fluttering laces of sunshine and shadow flipped rapidly over the windshield. Ahead, a stoplight turned green just in time to spare Joel the inconvenience of braking.

After awhile Ellie said, "Maybe he's a spy."

"A spy?" Joel asked.

"A Russian or something."

" I thought we were friends with the Russians these days," Joel said, looking at the van in the rear-view mirror and smiling again. "And even if we aren't friends with the Russians these days-why would a spy be interested in you or me?"

"That's easy," Ellie said. "He has us mixed up with someone else. He was assigned to tail someone living on our block, and he got confused."

"I ain't scared of any spy who's _that_ inept," Joel said. He reached out and fiddled with the air-conditioning controls, brought a gentle, cool breeze into the stuffy car.

"He might not be a spy," Ellie said, her attention captured by the unimposing little van. "He might be something else."

"Like what?"

"Let me think about it awhile," the girl said.

While Ellie thought about what the man in the van might be, Joel Miller watched the street ahead and thought about San Francisco. That hilly city was not just a geographical identity so far as Joel was concerned. To him, it was a synonym for the future and a symbol for everything that a man wanted in life. The new job was there, the innovative advertising agency that recognized and cultivated talented young commercial artists. The new house was there, the three-bedroom Spanish stucco on the edge of Lincoln Park, with its spectacular view of the Golden Gate area and the shaggy palm outside the master-bedroom window. And Tess was there, of course. If she had not been, the new job and the house would not have meant anything. He and Tess had met in Philadelphia, had falen in love there, had been married in the city hall on Market Street, with her sister, Ellie, as honorary best man and a woman from the Justice Department steno pool as their required adult witness. Then Ellie had been packed off to stay two weeks with Joel's brother Tommy in Boston, while the newlyweds flew to San Francisco to honeymoon, to meet Joel's new employers to whom he had spoken only over the telephone, and to find and buy the house in which they would start their life together. It was in San Francisco, more than Philly, that the future took shape and meaning. San Francisco _became_ the future. And Tess became inextricably entwined with that city. IN Miller's mind, she _was_ San Francisco, just as San Francisco _was_ the future. She was golden and even-tempered, exotic, sensuous, intellectually intriguing, comfortable yet exciting-everything that San Francisco was. And now, as he thought about Tess, the hilly streets and the crisp blue bay rose clearly on the screen behind his eyes.

"He's still back there," Ellie said, peering through the narrow rear window at the van.

"At least he hasn't tried to run us into a ditch yet," Joel said.

"He won't do that," Ellie said.

"Oh?"

"He'll just tail us. He's a government man."

"FBI, is he?"

"I think so," Ellie said, grimly compressing her lips.

"Why would he be after us?"

"He's probably got us mixed up with someone else," Ellie said. "He was assigned to tail some-radicals. He saw _your _long hair and got confused. He thinks _you're _the radical."

"Well," Joel said, "our own spies are just as inefficient as them Russians, aren't they?"

Joel's smile was too large for his face, a generous curve that was punctuated at each end with a dimple. He held the smile both because he felt so damned fine and because he knew that it was the best thing about his face. In all his thirty years, no one had ever told him that he was handsome. Three months after they met, when they were sleeping together, Tess had said, "Miller, you just aren't a handsome man. You're good looking, sure, but not handsome. When you say that I look smashing, I want to reciprocate-but I just can't lie to you. But your smile...Now _that's_ perfect. When you smile, you even look a little bit like Andrew Lincoln." Already they were too honest with each other for Miller to be hurt by what she'd said. Indeed he had been delighted by the comparison: "Andrew Lincoln? You really think so?" She had studied him a moment, putting her hand under his chin and turning his face this way and that in the weak orange light of the bedside lamp. "When you smile, you look _exactly_ like Lincoln-when he's trying to look ugly that is." He had gaped at her. "When he's tryin' ta' look _ugly,_ for Christ's sake?" She grimaced. "I meant...Well, Lincoln can't really look ugly, even when he tries. When you smile, then, you look like Lincoln but not as handsome..." He watched her trying to extricate herself from the embarrassing hole she'd dug, and he had begun to laugh. His laughter had infected her. Soon they were giggling like idiots, expanding on the joke and making it funnier, laughing until they were sick and then settling down and then making love with a paradoxically fierce affection. Ever since that night Miller tried to remember to smile a lot.

On the right-hand side of the street a sign announced the entrance to the Schuylkill Expressway. "Give your FBI man a break," Joel told the girl. "Let him tail us in peace for awhile. The expressway's coming up, so you better turn around and buckle your seatbelt."

"Just a minute," Ellie said.

"No," Joel said. "Get yer' seatbelt on." Ellie despised using the seatbelts.

"_Half _a minute," the girl said, straining even harder against the back of the seat as Joel drove the car onto the approach ramp leading up to the superhighway.

"Ellie-"

The girl turned around and bounced down onto the seat. "I just wanted to see if he followed us onto the expressway. He did."

"Well, 'course he did," Joel said. "An FBI man wouldn't be restricted to the city limits. He could follow us anywhere."

"Clear across the country?" The girl asked.

"Sure. Why not?"

Ellie laid her head back against the seat and laughed. "That's be hilarious. What would he do if he followed us clear across country and found out you weren't the radical he was after? Probably shit down both legs."

At the top of the ramp, Joel looked southeast at the two empty lanes of blacktop. He eased his foot down on the accelerator and they started west. "You gonna' put yer' seatbelt on?"

"Oh, sure." Ellie said, fumbling for the buckle. "I forgot." She had not forgotten of course. Ellie never forgot anything. She just didn't like to wear the belt.

Briefly taking his eyes from the empty highway ahead of them, Joel glanced sideways at the girl and saw her struggling with the seatbelt. Ellie grimaced, cursed the apparatus, making problems with it so Miller would know just what she thought of being tied down like a prisoner.

"You might as well grin and bear it." Joel said, grinning himself as he looked ahead at the highway again. "You're gonna' wear that belt the whole way to California, whether you like it or not."

"I won't like it," Ellie assured him. The seatbelt in place, she smoothed the wrinkles out of her red T-shirt. She tightened her ponytail. "Thirty-one hundred miles," she said, watching the gray roadway roll under and behind them. The Thunderbird's power seat elevated high enough to give her a good view. "How long will it take to drive that far?"

"We won't be lollin' around," Joel said. "We ought ta' get into San Francisco Saturday morning."

"Five days," Ellie said. "Hardly more than six hundred miles a day." She sounded disappointed by the pace.

"If you could spell me at the wheel," Joel said, "we'd do better. But I wouldn't want to handle much more than six hundred a day all by myself."

"So why didn't Tess drive out with us?" Ellie asked.

"She's gettin' the house ready. She met the movers there, and she's arrangin' for drapes and carpeting-all that stuff."

"Did you know that when I flew up to Boston to stay with Tommy while you two were on your honeymoon-that was my first plane ride?"

"I know," Joel said. Ellie had talked about it for two solid days after she came back.

"I really liked that plane ride."

"I know."

Ellie frowned. "Why couldn't we sell this car and fly out to California with Tess?"

"You know the answer to that," Joel said. "This car's only a year old. A new car depreciates the most in its first year. If you want to get your money out of it, you keep it for three or four years."

"You could afford the loss," Ellie said, beginning to beat a quiet but insistent rhythm on her knees. "I heard you and Tess talking. You'll be making a _fortune_ in San Francisco."

Joel held one palm out to dry it on the hushed breath of the air-conditioning vent on the dashboard. "Thirty-five thousand dollars a year is not a fortune."

"I only get a three dollar allowance," the girl said.

"True enough," Joel said. "But I've got nineteen years of experience and training on ya'."

The tires hummed pleasantly on the pavement.

A huge truck hurtled by on the other side of the road going in tward the city. It was the first traffic, besides the van, that they had seen.

"Thirty-one hundred miles," Ellie said. "That's just about one-eighth of the way around the world."

Joel had to think a minute. "That's right."

"If we kept driving and didn't stop in California, we'd need about forty days to circumnavigate the earth," Ellie said, holding her hands around an imaginary globe at which she was staring intently.

Joel remembered when the girl had first learned the word "circumnavigate" and had been fascinated with the sound and concept of it. For weeks she did not walk around the room or the block-she "circumnavigate" everything. "Well, we'd probably need more than forty days," Joel said. "I don't know what kind of driving time I can make on the Pacific Ocean."

Ellie thought that was funny. "I meant we could do it if there was a bridge," she said.

Joel looked at the speedometer and saw that they were only making a moderate fifty miles an hour, twenty less than he had intended to maintain on this first leg of the journey. Ellie was good company. Indeed, she was too good. If she kept distracting Joel, they'd need a month to get across the damn country.

"Forty days," Ellie mused. "That's half as long as they needed when Jules Verne wrote about it."

Though he knew that Ellie had been skipped ahead one grade in school and that her reading ability was still a couple of years in advance of that of her classmates, Joel was always surprised at the extent of the kid's knowledge.

"You've read _Around the World in Eighty Days,_ have ya'?"

"Sure," Ellie said. "A long time ago." She held her hands out in front of another vent and dried them as she had seen Miller do.

Though it was a small thing, that gesture made an impression on Miller. He, too, had been a shy, nervous kid whose palms were always too damp. Like Ellie, he had been shy with strangers, hadn't been into sports, an outcast among his contemporaries. In college he had begun a rigorous weight-lifting program, determined to develop himself into another Charles Atlas. By the time his chest filled out and his biceps hardened, he grew bored with the weight-lifting and quit bothering with it. At five-ten and a hundred-sixty pounds, he was no Charles Atlas. But he was slim and hard, and he was no longer the skinny kid, either. Still, he was awkward with people whom he had just met-and his palms were often damp with nervous perspiration. Deep inside, he had not forgotten what it was like to be constantly self-conscious and never self-confident enough. Watching Ellie dry her slender hands, Joel understood why he had taken an immediate liking to the girl and why they seemed so comfortable with each other from the day they met eighteen months before. Nineteen years separated them. But little else.

"He still back there?" Ellie asked, breaking into Joel's thoughts.

"Who?"

"The Van."

Joel checked the mirror. "He's there. FBI don't give up easily."

"Can I look?"

"You keep your belt on."

"This is going to be a bad trip," Ellie said morosely.

"It will be if you don't accept the rules at the start," Joel agreed.

Traffic picked up on the other side of the expressway as the early-bird commuters began their day and as an occasional truck whistled by on the last lap of a long cargo haul. On the westbound lanes, their own car ad the van were the only things in sight.

The sun was behind the Thunderbird, where it could not bother them. Ahead, the sky was marred by only two white clouds. The hills, on both sides, were green.

When they got on the Pennsylvania turnpike at Valley Forge and went west toward Harrisburg, Ellie said, "What about our tail?"

"Still there. Some poor FBI agent tracking the wrong prey."

"He'll probably lose his job," Ellie said. "That'll make an opening for me."

"You wanna' be an FBI agent?"

"I've thought about it," Ellie admitted.

Joel pulled the Thunderbird into the left lane, passed a car pulling a horse trailer. Two boys, a little younger than Ellie, were in the back seat of the car. They pressed against the side window and waved at Ellie, who blushed and looked sternly ahead.

"It wouldn't be boring in the FBI," Ellie said.

"Oh, I don't know about that. It might be pretty boring when you have to follow a crook for weeks before he does somethin' exciting."

"Well, it can't be any more boring than sitting under a seatbelt all the way to California," Ellie said.

God, Joel thought, I walked right into that one. He took the car into the right hand lane again, set the automatic accelerator for an even seventy miles per hour so that if Ellie got too interesting they would still make decent time. "When that guy followin' us gets us on a lonely stretch of road and runs us into a ditch, you'll thank me for making you wear your belt. It'll save your life."

Ellie turned and looked at him, her green eyes big. "I guess you aren't going to give in."

"You guessed right."

Ellie sighed. "You're more or less my father now. Aren't you?"

"I'm your sister's husband. But...Since your sister has custody of you, I guess you could say I have a father's right to make rules you'll live by."

Ellie shook her head, tightened her ponytail. "I don't know. Maybe it was better being an orphan."

'Oh, you think so, do you?" Miller asked, full of mock anger.

"If you hadn't come along, I wouldn't have gotten a plane ride to Boston," Ellie admitted. "I wouldn't get to go to California either. But...I don't know."

"You're too much," Miller said, ruffling the girl's hair with one hand.

Sighing loudly, as if she needed the patience of Job in order to get along with Miller, the girl smoothed her mussed hair and tightened her ponytail again. She straightened her shirt. "Well, I'll have to think about it. I'm just not sure yet.

* * *

**AN: I am back bitches! Well, let me know what you thought by hitting that little review button. This story is going to be a little longer than my other stories, so just sit back and wait for the next chapter.**

**Also, if you're interested, you should check out the beginning of my wife's story, Made To Suffer. Her Pen-name is Terminated1. But I guess this is goodbye until next time. Adios.**

**~Exangellion**


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2:

The engine was silent. The tires made almost no noise on the well surfaced roadbed.

Five minutes slipped by without awkwardness, they were comfortable enough with each other to endure silence. However, Ellie grew restless and began to tap wildly elaborate rhythms on her knees.

"You wanna' find somethin' on the radio?" Joel asked.

"I'll have to unbuckle my seatbelt."

"Okay. But just for a minute or two."

The girl relished the slithering retreat of the cloth belt. In an instant she was on her knees on the seat, turned and looking out the rear window. "He's still behind us!"

"Hey!" Joel said. "You're supposed to be finding a radio station." Ellie turned and sat down. "Well, you'd have thought I was slipping if I didn't try." Her grin was irresistible.

"Get some music on that thing," Joel said.

Ellie fiddled with the AM-FM radio until she located a rock-and-roll show. She set the volume, then suddenly popped up on her knees and looked out the rear window. "Staying right on our tail," she said. Then she dropped into her seat and grabbed for her belt.

"You're a real troublemaker, ain't ya'?" Joel asked.

"Don't worry about me," the girl said. "We have to worry about that guy following us."

* * *

At eight-fifteen they stopped at a Howard Johnson's restaurant outside of Harrisburg. The moment Joel slotted the car into a parking space in front of the orange-roofed building, Ellie was looking for the van. "He's here. Like I expected."

Joel looked out his side window and saw the van pass in front of the restaurant, heading for the service station at the other end. On the side of thr white Cheverolet, brilliant blue and green letters read: _Automover. One way do-it-yourself convenience! _Then the van was out of sight.

"C'mon," Joel said. "Let's get some breakfast."

"Yeah," Ellie said. "I wonder if he'll have the nerve to walk in after us?"

"He's just here to get gas. By the time we come out, he'll be fifty miles down the turnpike."

* * *

When they came outside again nearly an hour later, the parking spaces in front of the restaurant were all occupied. A new Cadillac, two ageless Volkswagens, a gleaming red Triumph sports car, a battered and muddy old Buick, their own black Thunderbird, and a dozen other vehicles nosed into the curb like several species of animals sharing a trough. The rented van was nowhere in sight.

"He musta' phoned his superiors while we were eatin'-found out he was following the wrong people," Joel said.

Ellie frowned. She jammed her hands into her jeans pockets, loked up and down the row of cars as if she thought the Cheverolet were really there in some clever new disguise. Now she would have to make up a whole new game.

Which was just as well, so far as Miller was concerned. It was not likely that even Ellie would devise _two_ games with built-in excuses for her popping out of her seatbelt every fifteen minutes.

They walked slowly back to the car, Miller savoring the crisp morning air, Ellie squinting at the parking lot and hoping for a glimpse of the van.

Just as they were to the car, the girl said, "I'll bet he's parked around the side of the restaurant." Before Miller could forbid her, Ellie jumped back onto the sidewalk and ran around the corner of the building, her converse sneakers slapping loudly on the concrete.

Joel got in the car, started it, and set the air conditioning a notch higher to blow out the stale air that had accumulated while they were having breakfast.

By the time he had belted himself in, Ellie was back. The girl opened the passenger's door and climbed inside. She was downcast. "Not back there either." She shut and locked the door, slumped down, thin arms folded over her chest.

"Seatbelt." Joel put the car in gear and reversed out of the parking lot.

Grumbling, Ellie put on the belt.

They pulled across the macadam to the service station and stopped by the pumps to have the tank topped off.

The man who hurried out to wait on them was in his forties, a beefy farmer-type with a flushed face and gnarled hands. He was chewing tobacco, not a common sight in Philly or San Francisco, and her was cheerful. "Help you folks?"

"Fill it with regular, please," Alex said, passing his credit card through the window. "It probably only needs half a tank."

"Sure thing." Four letters-_Chet-_were stitched across the man's shirt pocket. Chet bent down and looked at the girl. "How are you, Chief?"

Ellie looked at him, incredulous. "...Fine," she stammered.

Chet showed a mouthful of stained teeth. "Glad to hear it." Then he went to the back of the car to put in the gasoline.

"Why did he call me Chief?" Ellie asked. She was over her incredulity now, and she was embarrassed instead.

"Maybe he thinks yer an Indian," Joel said.

"Oh, sure."

"Or in charge of a fire company."

Ellie scrunched down in the seat and looked at him sourly. "I should have gone on the plane with Tess. I can't take your shit for five days."

Joel laughed. "You're too much." He knew that Ellie's perception and vocabulary were far in advance of her real age, and he had long ago grown accustomed to the girl's sometimes startling sarcasm and occasional good turn or phrase. But there was a forced quality to this precocious banter. Ellie was trying hard to be grown up. She was straining out of childhood, trying to grit her teeth and _will _her way through adolescence and into adulthood. Miller was familiar with that temperament, for it had been his own when he was Ellie's age.

Chet came back and gave miller the credit card and sales form on a hard plastic holder. While Joel took the pen and scrawled his name, the attendant peered at Ellie again. "Have a long trip ahead of you, Chief?"

Ellie was as shaken this time as she had been when Chet had first addressed her. "California," she said, looking at her knees.

"Well," Chet said, "ain't that something? You're the second in an hour on their way to California. I always ask where people's going. Gives me a sense of helping them along, you know? An hour ago this guy's going to California, and now you. Everyone's going to California except me." He sighed.

Joel gave back the clipboard and tucked his credit card into his wallet. He glanced at Ellie and saw that the girl was intently cleaning one fingernail with the other in order to have something to occupy her eyes if Chet should want to resume their one-sided conversation.

"Here you go." Chet handed Joel the receipt. "Way out to the coast?" He shifted his wad of tobacco from the left to the right side of his mouth.

"That's right."

"Brother and sister?" Chet asked.

"Excuse me?"

"You two brother and sister?"

"Oh, no," Joel said. He knew there was no time or reason for a full explanation of his and Ellie's relationship. "She's my daughter."

"Daughter?" Chet seemed not to have heard the word before.

"Yes." Even if he was not Ellie's father, he was old enough to be.

Chet looked at Joel's coarse hair, at the way it spilled over his collar. He looked critically at Miller's brightly patterned shirt with its large wooden buttons. Joel almost thanked the man for implying that he was not old enough to have a kid Ellie's age-and then he realized that the attendant's mood had changed. The man was not saying Miller was too young to be the father to a fourteen year old, but that a father ought to set a better example. Miller could look and dress strangely if he were Ellie's brother, but if he were Elllie's father, it was inappropriate-at least, it was to Chet's way of thinking.

"Thought you was twenty, twenty-one," Chet said, tonguing his tobacco.

"Thirty," Joel said, wondering why he bothered to answer.

The attendant looked at the sleek black car. A subtle hardness came into his eyes. Clearly, he thought that while it was fine for Miller to be driving a Thunderbird that belonged to his father, it was a different thing if Miller owned the car himself. If a man who looked like Miller could have a fancy car and trips to California, while a workingman half again his age could not-there was not justice. "Well," Joel said, "You have a nice day."

Chet stepped back onto the pump island without wishing them a good trip. He frowned at the car. When the power window hummed up in one smooth motion, he frowned more deeply, the lines in his red brow bunched together like rolls in corrugated sheet metal.

"Such a nice man." Joel put the car in gear and got out of there.

When they were on the turnpike going west again, Ellie suddenly laughed aloud.

"What's so funny?" Joel asked. He was shivering inside, angry with Chet out of proportion to what the man had done. Indeed, the man had done nothing except reveal a rather quiet prejudice.

"When he said you looked twenty-one, I thought he was going to call you Chief like me," Ellie said. "That would have been good."

"Oh, sure! That would have been hysterical."

Ellie shrugged. "You thought it was funny when he called _me_ Chief."

As Miller's anger and fear settled, he realized that his own reaction to the attendant's unvoiced hatred was only a milder version of the overreaction which Ellie had shown to the man's friendly small talk. Had the girl seen through Chet's original folksy persona to the not-so-folksy core? Or had she just been her usual shy self? It really did not matter. Whatever the case, the fact remained that an injustice had been done both of them. "I'm sorry, Ellie. I should never have approved of the condescending tone he used with you."

"He treated me like I was a kid."

"It's a natural trap for adults to fall into," Joel said. "Bit it ain't right. Are you goin' ta' except my apology?"

Ellie was especially serious, sitting straight and stiff, for this was the first time an adult had asked her forgiveness. "I accept," she said soberly. Then her gamin' face broke into a wide smile. "But I still wish that he had called _you_ Chief just like he did me."

* * *

Thick pines and black-trunked elms crowded against the sides of the road now, swaying gently in the spring wind. The highway rose nearly a mile. At the crest id did not slope down again but continued across a flate table of land toward another gradual slope a mile away. The forest still loomed up, the tall sentinel pines in grand array, the sprawling elms like generals inspecting the troops.

Halfway along this flat stretch, on the right, was a picnic and rest area. THe brush had been cleared from beneath the trees. A few wooden tables-anchored to concrete stanchions to guard against theft-and several trash baskets were fixed at intervals under the scattered pines. A sign announced public rest rooms.

At this hour of the morning there was no one at the picnic tables. However, at the far western end of the miniature park, stopped in the exit lane and waiting to pull back onto the pike, was the delivery van.

_Automover, One Way Move-It-Yourself Convenience!_

It was unquestionably the same van.

"There he is again!" Ellie said, pressing her nose against the window as they swept past the van at seventy miles an hour. "It really is him!"

Miller looked in the rear-view mirror and watched the delivery van pull onto the main road. It accelerated rapidly. In three or four minutes it caught up with them, settling in a quarter of a mile behind, pacing them as it had before.

Miller knew that it was just coincidence. There was no reality in Ellie's game. It was as much make-believe as all the games he had played with the girl in the past. No one in the world had a grudge against them. No one in the world had a reason to follow them with sinister intent. Coincidence...

Nevertheless, a chill lay the length of his back, a crust of imaginary ice.

* * *

AN: Well, we're still nowhere closer to answers than we were in the last chapter. Why is this guy following Joel and Ellie, who is he and what is in store for these two? Find out next time in: Fear.

~Exangellion


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3:

George Leland handled the rented twenty-foot Chevrolet was as if he were pushing a baby carriage, not even rattling the furniture and household goods that were packed into the cargo space behind the front seat. The land whizzed past, and the road rumbled underneath, and Leland was in command of it all.

He had grown up with trucks and other big machines, and he had a special talent for making them perform as they had been built to perform. On a farm near Lancaster, he had driven a hay truck by the time he was thirteen, touring his father's fields and loading from the separate baler beds. Before he was out of high school, he had operated the mower, bailer, plow, and all the other powerful equipment that brought a farm full circle from planting to harvesting to planting once more. When he went away to college, he helped pay his tuition by driving a delivery van much like the one he was now pushing across Pennsylvania.

Now, all Monday morning and then past noon, he nursed the rented van westward. He stayed the same distance behind the black Thunderbird at all times. When the car slowed down, he slowed down too. When it accelerated, he quickly caught up with it. For the most part, however, the Thunderbird maintained a precise seventy miles an hour. Leland knew that the top-of-the-line model T-Bird had a speed-set control on the steering wheel which took some of the effort out of long-distance driving. Miller was probably using that device. But it did not matter. Effortlessly, skillfully, George Leland matched the car's automatically controlled pace for hour after hour, almost as if he were a machine himself.

Leland was a big man, six-three and over two hundred pounds. He had once been twenty pounds heavier, but lately he had suffered a weight loss because he forgot to eat regular meals. His broad shoulders were more hunched than they had once been, his narrow waist even narrower. He had a square face framed with blonde, almost white, hair. His eyes were blue, complexion clear except for a spray of freckles across his blunt nose. His neck was was all muscle, gristle, and corded veins. When he gripped the steering wheel with his big hands and made his biceps swell with the unconscious fierceness of his grip, he looked absolutely immovable, as if he were welded to the vehicle.

He did not switch on the radio.

He did not look at the scenery.

He did not smoke, chew gum, or talk to himself.

Mile after mile, his attention was on the road, the car ahead, the machine that hummed satisfactorily all around him. Not once in those first hours of the journey did he think specifically about the man and the girl in the Thunderbird. His discordant thoughts, but for his driving, were vague and un detailed. Mostly he was riveted by a broad mesmeric hatred that had no single focus. Somehow the car ahead would eventually become that focus. He knew this. But for the moment he only followed like a machine.

From Harrisburg, the Thunderbird went west on the turnpike, switched from that to Interstate 70, and passed across the northernmost sliver of West Virginia. Past Wheeling, barely inside Ohio, the car signaled its intention to take an exit lane into a service area full of gasoline stations, motels, and restaurants.

The moment he saw the flashing signal, Leland braked and allowed the van to fall a mile behind Miller. When he took the ramp a minute after the Thunderbird, the big black car was nowhere in sight. At the bottom of the ramp, Leland hesitated only a second, then turned west toward the heaviest concentration of tourist facilities. He drove slowly, looking for the car. He found it parked in front of a rectangular aluminum diner that looked like an old-fashioned railroad passenger car. The T-Bird was cooling in the shade of a huge sign that proclaimed _Harry's Fine Food._

Leland drove until he came to Breen's, the last diner in the chrome, plastic, fake-stone, neon jungle of the interchange. He parked the Chevrolet on the far side of the small structure so that no one down at Harry's Fine Food, five hundred yards away, would see it. He got out, locked the van, and went to have his own lunch.

Breen's was, at least on the outside, much like the restaurant where Miller and the kid had stopped. It was eighty feet long, an aluminum tube designed to look like a railroad passenger car, with one long narrow window row around three sides and an entrance cubicle tacked on the front almost as an afterthought.

Inside, a single width of cracked plastic-coated booths was built onto the wall beside the contiguous windows. Each booth was equipped with a scarred ashtray, cylindrical glass sugar dispenser, glass salt and pepper shakers, a stainless steel napkin dispenser, and a selector for the jukebox that stood next to the rest rooms at the extreme east end of the restaurant. A wide aisle separated the booths from the counter that ran from one end of the place to the other.

Leland turned right when he went in, walked to the end of the counter, and sat on the curve where he could occasionally look out the windows beyond the booths and see the Thunderbird down at Harry's.

Because it was the last restaurant in the complex, and because the lunch-hour rush has passed by two-thirty in the afternoon, Breen's was almost deserted. In a booth just inside the door, a middle-aged couple worked at hot roast beef sandwiches in mutual stony silence. An Ohio State Police lieutenant occupied the booth behind them, facing Leland. He was busy with a cheeseburger and French fries. In the booth at the far end of the room from Leland, a frowsy waitress with bleached hair smoked a cigarette and stared at the yellowed tile ceiling.

The only other person in the place was the counter waitress, who came to see what Leland wanted. She was perhaps nineteen, a fresh and pretty blonde with eyes as blue as Leland's. Her uniform was off the rack of a discount house, but she had personalized it. The skirt was hemmed eight inches above her shapely knees. A small embroidered chipmunk capered on one skirt pocket, a rabbit on the other. She had replaced the uniform's original white buttons with red ones. On her left breast stood an embroidered bird, and on her right breast was her name in fancy script: _Janet._ She had a sweet smile, a curiously charming way of cocking her head, an almost Mickey Mouse cuteness-and she was obviously an easy lay.

"Seen the menu?" She asked. Her voice was at once throaty and childlike.

"Coffee and a cheeseburger," Leland said.

"French fries too? They're already made."

"Well, okay," he said.

She wrote it down, then winked at him. "Back in a jiff."

He watched her walk up the service aisle behind the counter. Her trim legs scissored prettily. Her tight uniform clung to the well-delineated halves of her round ass. Suddenly, though the transformation was impossible, she was nude. To his eye, her clothes vanished in an instant. He saw all of her long legs, the divided globe of her behind, the exquisite line of her slim back...

He looked guiltily down at the counter top as he felt his loins tighten, and he was abruptly confused, disoriented. In that instant he could not even say where he was.

Janet came back with the coffee and put it in front of him. "Cream?"

"Yes, please."

She reached under the counter and came up with a two-inch-high cardboard container shaped like a milk bottle. She laid out his silverware, inspected her work, and approved. Instead of leaving him to his coffee, however, she leaned her elbows on the counter, propped her chin in her hands, gave him a saucy grin. "Where are you moving to?" She asked.

Leland frowned. "How did you know I'm moving?"

"Saw you pull in. Saw the Automover. You moving around here someplace?"

"No," he said, pouring cream into his coffee. "California."

"Oh, wow!" She said. "Great! Palm trees, sunshine, surfing..."

"Yeah," he said, wishing she would go away.

"I'd love to surf," she said. "I like the sea. Summers, I take two weeks in Atlantic City, lay around on the beach and get real brown. I tan well. I have this _very _skimpy bikini that browns me all over." She laughed with false modesty. "Well..._almost_ all over. They don't approve of bikinis that small in Atlantic City."

Leland looked at her over the rim of his coffee cup.

She met his gaze and held it until he looked down again.

Burg and fries!" The cook called from the serving window which connected the restaurant to the kitchen.

"Yours," she said quietly. "She went and got the food, put it down before him. "Anything else?"

"No," he said.

She leaned against the counter again, talking while he ate. She worked hard at her ingenuousness. She giggled, did a lot of blinking and practiced blushing. He decided she was five years older than he had first thought.

"Could I have another cup of coffee?" He asked at last, just to be rid of her for a few moments.

"Sure," she said, picking up his empty cup and walking back toward the tall chrome brewer.

Watching her, Leland felt an odd vibration pass through him-and then he was seeing her without her clothes, just as he had before. He was not just imagining what she would look like when she was nude. He actually _saw _her as clearly as he saw the normal features of the diner around her. Her long legs and round buttocks were taut as she stood on her toes to check the filter in the top of the huge pot. When she turned, her breasts swayed, nipples swelling even as he watched.

Closing his eyes, Leland tried desperately to erase the vision. Opening them, he saw that it remained. And second by second, the longer it remained, the stranger he felt.

He closed his hand around the knife she had given him. He lifted the knife and held it before his face and looked at the bright serrated edge. Then the blade softened, diffused, as he looked beyond it to the nude girl walking slowly toward him, walking toward him as if through syrup, her bare breasts moving sensuously with each step...He thought of putting the knife between her ribs, deep between them, then twisting it back and forth until she stopped screaming and gave him a rictus of welcome...

Then, when she was almost up to him, the overfilled coffee cup balanced carefully in both her slim hands, Leland realized that someone was watching him. He turned slightly on his stool and looked at the middle-aged couple in the booth by the door. The man had a mouthful of food, but he was not chewing it. Cheeks bulging, he was watching Leland, watching the tight expression on Leland's face and the knife held up like torch in the engineer's big right hand. In the second booth, the policeman had also stopped eating to watch Leland. He was frowning, as if he didn't quite know what to make of the knife.

Leland put the knife down and slid off the stool just as the waitress arrived with the coffee. He fumbled for his wallet and threw two dollars at the counter.

"You aren't leaving, are you?" She asked. Her voice was faraway and so icy that it made Leland shiver.

He did not answer her. He walked quickly to the door and went outside. The day seemed fiercely bright as he hurried to the van.

Sitting behind the wheel of the Chevrolet, he heard his heart pounding relentlessly against the walls of his chest.

* * *

**AN: Well, now we've been introduced to the looney following Joel and Ellie. Does he appear okay in the head to you? **

**Originally, I had intended for this chapter to be longer, but I got next to no sleep last night, so this was all I could do at the moment. **

**Next chapter, we will see more from George Leland's point of view, and then we'll get back to Joel and Ellie. But for now, patience young ones, and all will be revealed in time.**

**~Exangellion**


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